Newt Gingrich Is Still Pretending To Run For President — And He’s Bringing His “Campaign” To New York

April 13, 2012

Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich is still pretending that he’s running for president, and will be “campaigning” in New York next week — which is hilarious for a number of reasons.

For starters, he has literally no chance of winning the Republican nomination — he currently has only 136 delegates, and already has said he realizes Mitt Romney (with his 666 delegates) will be the nominee. Secondly, New York hasn’t played a significant role in a Republican primary in more than three decades, so of all the places he could pretend to campaign next week, the Empire State should be one of the last.

As we’ve been reporting for about two weeks, Gingrich will be in town
on April 19, to attend the New York State Republican Party’s Annual
Dinner. But that won’t be his only stop — he reportedly plans to
“campaign” in New York in the days following the dinner.

A source in the know told the Voice
last week that Gingrich actually planned on holding campaign events in
New York — despite his campaign, at this point, being a waste of
Gingrich’s time and his supporters’ money.

A Gingrich campaign spokesman confirmed our tip to the Albany Times Union (the Gingrich campaign did not respond to our request for confirmation last week).

From the Times Union:

“The
campaign is what the campaign is. We’re limited by funds,” Stephen
Luftschein, Gingrich’s volunteer coordinator in New York, told me by
phone. But he said there will be “a couple of events in the
Buffalo-Rochester area.”

Upstate, as Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s
Center for Politics, told us last week, is where Rick Santorum stood to
win a few delegates — 26, Sabato predicted — from the state’s
Conservative voters who question whether Romney’s far enough to the
right. Many of those delegates could go to Gingrich (who claims he’s the
“last Conservative standing“), but it still would have literally no impact on the outcome of the primary.

So why would Gingrich continue to chug along? Sabato says it’s an
attempt to gain a little clout within the party. If that’s the case, it
seems like an odd way to go about it considering his campaign is
creeping into the humiliation zone. Others (Fox News, in particular)
think he’s trying to land a gig with CNN.

Whatever reason Gingrich has for waging on with his hopeless
campaign, one things is certain: he will not be the Republican nominee
for president.